Study of Bowel Disease Focuses on Fungi

"Fungi" is not exactly a pretty word to bring up in the discussion of digestive health, but fungi are a crucial subject of research if doctors want to better understand the causes of inflammatory bowel disease and other conditions.

At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, researchers have identified and characterized a vast number of fungi inhabiting the large intestine.

The medical center's Inflammatory Bowel and Immunobiology Research Institute studied fungi in an animal model of IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease), with the results recently published in an issue of Science.

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As a Cedars-Sinai media release explains, the digestive tract hosts an estimated 100 trillion bacteria, with the combination of bacteria, viruses and fungi outnumbering human cells.

Some microbes aid digestion, produce nutrients or suppress harmful microbes. But other microbes contribute to obesity and play a role in the two major inflammatory bowel diseases, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

David Underhill, Ph.D., who led the study, said it has long been known that fungi reside in the gut. “But we’re among the first to investigate what types, how many, and whether they’re important in disease.

“We were truly stunned to see just how common fungi are, identifying more than 100 different types,” Underhill said, adding that the researchers were able to find links to digestive disorders when focusing on a protein called Dectin-1.

Dectin-1 is produced by white blood cells and is used by the immune system to detect and kill fungi. It appears that the protein goes to work on the fungi causing inflammation in the gut.

Researchers say the finding is relevant to the study of ulcerative colitis, a form of IBD characterized by inflammation and ulcers in the top layers of the large intestine's lining.

Changing the way IBD has traditionally been treated, TNF inhibitors – known as biologics – are used to treat both Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Biologics are proteins that block inflammation-causing substances in the body. They are designed to specifically target the immune system molecules involved in the disease process, even in the case of diseases where the cause is unknown.

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